Workshop of liturgical embroidery of the monastery... Lot 51

Workshop of liturgical embroidery of the monastery San Lorenzo of El Escorial, circa 1580-1586 The Marriage of the Virgin in embroidery of naked gold, gold, silk and silver threads. The fleshings, executed with the stitch cuttings obtained growing of silk to the satin stitch the strands of golden threads, after having "stripped" them of the metal blade. The embroidery of hair and beards in split stitch, following the direction of the curls or waves. The border is decorated with canetille, strands of broth and a braid embroidered with two parallel lines of cordonet enclosing a large rope made of four strands of gold thread, on a bed of strands of blue silk sorbec and silver blade. Spain, late 16th century. Height 28,5 Width 19,6 cm. Scene without the border: Height 25,8 Width 18,5 cm. Provenance : - commissioned by King Philip II of Spain (1527-1598). - Royal monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, probably until the beginning of the 19th century. - Josiane and Daniel Fruman collection, since the end of the 20th century. A late 16th century Spanish embroidered fabric by the royal monastery of El Escorial depicting the wedding of the Blessed Virgin Mary. An exhaustive presentation, with bibliographical sources and documentation, is available on the site rouillac.com Installed by Philip II of Spain in the San Lorenzo monastery of El Escorial, which he had just founded, the liturgical embroidery workshop of El Escorial brought together between 1571 and 1598 the most skilful artists, embroiderers, craftsmen and trimmers, notably from Flanders, of an empire on which the sun never sets. Spain lived its "Golden Age", of which the Escorial is the main achievement. Weighing all his weight in the Tridentine Counter-Reformation, Philip II put the wealth drawn from America at the service of the Catholic cult, spending without counting the cost for the greater glory of God. The workshop of liturgical embroideries alone employed one hundred and nine embroiderers and twenty-six passementiers working without slackening for a monarch whose ambition was to remove from Atlas the weight of the world so that it could rest. An inventory of 1605 counts more than 1200 different chasubles! These workshops transformed into silk, gold and silver threads the drawings of the most famous artists of their time, whose sheets are preserved in the Royal Library of Madrid as well as in some of the greatest museums in the world. With the Napoleonic conquest, the Escorial was emptied of its treasures in order to create a museum in Madrid, causing poorly documented disappearances and dispersals. However, outside Spain, only a handful of embroideries from these legendary workshops are preserved: two in the treasure of the cathedral of Puy-en-Velay, two in Germany, in the Kunstgewerbemuseum of Berlin and in the museum of Krefeld, and one in a private collection published by de Farcy in 1890, which is currently not located. This shows the great rarity of this Marriage of the Virgin! Probably inspired by an engraving by Israhel van Meckenem (around 1445-1503) based on a lost drawing by Hans Holbein the Elder (around 1460-1524), our scene also includes some details from an engraving by Adriaen Collaert (1560-1618) after Jan van der Straet (1523-1605). The marriage of the Virgin Mary is not mentioned in the Gospels. The Virgin Mary, haloed on the left, is united by the high priest in the center to St. Joseph on the right, who is recognized by his flowery staff, in a baroque architectural setting. However, it is the border braid that allows us to date this embroidery with precision. It has the same techniques and dimensions as perfectly documented borders preserved in the monastery of El Escorial, in Puy-en-Velay, in the museum of Krefeld and in the collection published by de Farcy. The "sets in naked gold" culminate in the documentation of El Escorial between 1584 and 1587. The entire surface of the work is covered with strands of gold thread, thrown and stopped only at the two ends, crossed two by two with silks of different shades to form the design. In the darker areas, the silk dots touch each other to cover the gold, while the crossed silk dots are more or less far apart to let the gold show in the lighter, brighter areas. A white set, begun in 1580 and finished six years later, is thus reported to be embroidered with "entire portraits of virgins." The specialist Maria Barrigón Montañés suggests that this set was actually decorated with scenes from the life of the Virgin and used for the celebration of Our Lady's Day. Since no fragments of this ornament are preserved in El Escorial or anywhere else, we can only hypothesize that our embroidery is one of the few relics of this lost set.